Weeks ago a friend of mine was visiting Hong Kong from Silicon Valley. She had no idea about Alibaba and what was it doing. So I explained the whole B2B market scene in the region and the business model to her, etc, etc, etc. Her response to my explanation was kinda… short and concise. She said, “that’s it?”
That’s it? Companies pay to be listed on a website and then wait to be found by buyers? Of course this is just a stripped version of online B2B model. But having said that, the technical core isn’t any rocket science neither.
If you have followed my blog, you know I have been talking in my previous posts about the online B2B portals have better competitive edge over the trade show organizers in terms of technical capacity. But if we look at the competition from the other side, how difficult would the traditional B2B players be sharpening up the technical strength? Well, what I am about to tell may give them some hints.
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What if you can build an Alibaba clone at a price of US$150 (IPO not included). A software package called “Alibaba Clone” comes with everything like category management, buy and sell leads management, RFQ management, online marketplace, payment and shopping carts, etc., which allows you to setup a website like this. Pretty interesting huh.
Want one more killer application? How about a vertical search engine which you can crawl and index million of web pages within a week? Try Nutch, an open source search engine that was once tested by Yahoo! Lab. You can quickly add a true search engine and get it up and running. I’ve test-drive it. Nutch is really a sexy piece of software.
So, now with the handy tech tools, trade show organizers can build private label B2B suites and start thinking along the service integration. The technical strength won’t give them the winning hand, but certainly will gear them up for the second round rematch.
And I am more than happy to see the B2B scene continues to play vibrantly.
Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
Eddie - interesting post and the Taribaba.com site is amusing. However, I’d have to say that visitors from Silicon Valley have been missing the point on Asian B2B for years. They love to believe that technology can solve all our problems and, clever as they may be, are generally clueless about most businesses really work.
Other than picking up a little bit of Google Adwords business, I don’t see much relevance for these automatically generated and populated sites. They don’t solve two key problems of Asian B2B:
(i) revenue generation: to get real revenues out of this business still requires (and will for the foreseeable future in my opinion) f2f selling or, at the very least, direct sales by telephone. That’s why the big business out there right now (Ali vs. Global Sources) is a battle of the sales forces, not technology. You’re right, the tech is simple and that’s what the market needs.
(ii) the elephant in the room that people have only just begun to acknowledge is quality and the need for verfication of the 1,000s of SME suppliers. There are clever technical discussions of this but not which solve the problem or provide an alternative to personal contact.
Like you, however, I remain amazed that the big trade fair companies are making such poor use of even the limited technology they need to master. I don’t think the $150 Alibaba clone is too relevant but capturing marketing $$ online as well as offline surely can’t be that hard if companies organise themselves around the challenge.
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